Wednesday, May 13, 2015

About two
years ago I started selling some of my creations on Etsy.com.If you are not familiar with Etsy, it is a
website that offers crafters and artisans a virtual shop of your own to sell your
items.Actually, I have two shops on
Etsy. The first is called the Firebird Cigar Box Transformation Studio, or
Firebird Box Studio for short.In this
shop I sell repurposed wooden cigar boxes. I use the empty cigar boxes as a
medium for my creativity by carving or pyrography or collage.I have been making these boxes for many years
now and they were accumulating in my basement.My shop on Etsy gives me the opportunity to sell some of my accumulation
without the hassle of setting up a booth and selling them at a craft fair.

I stared
the second Etsy shop last month.It is
called “Cast with Wood”.In it I sell
all my other crafted wooden items that are not repurposed cigar boxes.Most of what I sell in this shop are hand
crafted wooden boxes.I’m not trying to
earn a living from these shops, just a little spending money.(Actually, most of the proceeds go back into
tools and supplies.)

If your
wooden craft creations are starting to take up too much space in your house,
even after you’ve given gifts to all your family and friends, maybe you should
consider Etsy. It really works.But
before you jump in, here are a few tips based on my personal experience.

Tip #1 –
Browse around Etsy first

Before you
set up your shop on Etsy, take some time to browse around.Search for items similar to the ones you will
be selling.Notice how the seller
describe the items and present them.See
what they are charging and what they add for shipping.Notice the quality of the photographs they
use.Think of a possible name for your
shop and see if it has already been used or if there are similar shop names
that might get confused with your shop.Figure out ways to distinguish your shop from the competition, to make
it stand out.

Tip #2 –
Begin with the end in mind

This tip
is straight out of Stephen R. Covey’s famous book: “The Seven Habits of HighlyEffective People”.Before you start
writing a description of any item you plan to put into your shop, look at the
item and figure out how you are going to ship it.Actually, your very first step would be to
purchase a postage scale if you don’t already have one. Once you know the weight and the size you can
investigate shipping options.Will you
use the United Stated Postal Service, or UPS, or FedEx?If USPS, will you ship Priority Mail or
regular mail?Do you have a box to fit
the item, or will you use a standard USPS box?Do you have packing material?Will you charge the purchaser the exact shipping cost, or will you add
an amount for handling?You get the
picture.

Tip #3 –
Take good quality photos

If you are
not good at taking good quality photos, get the help of a friend.I think it is extremely important to present
you items as professionally as possible.In browsing through Etsy, you will quickly notice the shops that use
good photography verses the ones that take a quick iPhone shot on the dining
room table. Use a background cloth. (Felt or fleece fabric works fine.) Show
you items in natural light.Show
close-up details.Etsy allows you 5 photos
per item. Use all five.

A carved wooden cigar box I sold on Etsy

Tip #4 –
Get organized

Use an
excel spreadsheet to keep track of every item listed and every purchase.Set up your own system.Number each item. If you are not comfortable
with Excel, do it by hand on a ledger sheet.Etsy is good at keeping track of your sales, but it is a good idea to
keep your own records so you can personalize them.If you think that you will only be selling a
few items so you don’t need organization and records, you will have a rude
awakening.Things get confused rather
quickly.If you are not organized your
efforts will result in problems, not enjoyment.

Tip #5 –
Don’t price too low

This is a
common mistake for crafters.Don’t price
your turned wooden bowl to compete with the mass-produced turned wooden salad bowl from some
sweat shop in Asia, on sale at Wal-Mart.The things you make with your own hands are valuable, one-of-a-kind
works of art and should be priced as such.People scan Etsy looking for unique crafted item for that special gift.They are seldom looking for the cheapest
item, but rather the best item for their needs. They appreciate your work and
craftsmanship and are willing to pay for it.

Tip #6 –
Treat the buyer like they are royalty

I’m
suggesting you go beyond merely thinking “the customer is always right”.I believe you must treat them with extra
special attention.Your goal should be
to make them happy with their purchase.Thank them often.Include a
personalized form letter or note with the shipment, and maybe add a short
handwritten line.The making of some of
the items I have sold were actually described on this bog.I pointed that out to the buyer. It's all part of the personal connection. There is a practical motive for this customer rapport:
positive feedback comments on you Etsy site.When a buyer takes the time to write a nice comment, it is certainly
very valuable for influencing potential future buyers.

Give Etsy
a try.It is a rewarding feeling when
someone sees the value in your work and is willing to pay you money to posess
the item you created.

Saturday, August 30, 2014

I visited the C. F. Martin & Co. guitar manufacturing plant in Nazareth,
PA and took the factory tour. I was very impressed and also very
surprised.For some dumb reason I had expected
to see a tiny woodshop with talented luthiers using hand tools, producing a few
guitars a day.Martin Guitar certainly
has talented luthiers using hand tools, many with over 30 years of experience; but
this all takes place within a humongous factory that uses modern production
machinery to produce several hundred guitars per day. Sure, they use laser cutting of the wood and
robots for the final sanding and polishing, but the important woodcraft, all
fitting and forming, is still done proudly by hand.

I observed one craftsperson fitting the guitar neck
into the body. To me, it looked like a
nice tight fit, but it was obviously not up to Martin Guitar standards, or her
own personal standards as a luthier.She
tapped the neck out and used a very sharp chisel to shave a tiny, paper-thin
slice from each side surface. She then gave it another dry fitting before
gluing. It was now perfect.It makes me
feel good to see that exacting wood craftsmanship can still exist in such a
high production environment.

The guitar tops are almost always made of
spruce.The sides and back of the
guitars is where the “wow” factor comes in.Martin Guitar uses beautifully
grained hardwoods like walnut, tiger maple, mahogany, sapale and rosewood.Just gorgeous.

Many of Martin guitars are custom made and have
special mother of pearl inlays.Laser
assisted, but the final inlay and fitting work is all done by hand.

If you are a serious guitar player, the Martin
Guitar factory with its spectacular guitar museum is like Mecca to Moslems or
Vatican City to Catholics.I don’t have
to tell you about it.You’ve probably
been there already.If you are a wood
crafter or love objects made from wood, I would recommend that you go out of your way to visit this place
and take the tour. It’s very impressive.

Tuesday, January 14, 2014

I love fly fishing.I enjoy standing
in the stream and feeling nature surround me.I enjoy the challenge of trying to make a perfect cast where the fly
line just rolls out to exactly where you want the fly to land.I enjoy watching the pattern of the water
flowing over the rocks.Someone once
told me that, at times, a trout will actually get snagged on the sharp little
hook attached to the fly at the end of your line.I think he was making it up.I never catch any fish.But I do enjoy the experience.
﻿﻿I got an idea to make a fly storage box using band saw box techniques.I could use magnets for closure, but what could
I use for a hinge?All of the hand-made
wooden fly boxes I found on the internet used brass hinges.They required extra thickness of the wood and,
from my experience, were difficult to set perfectly on small boxes.I got the idea of using a thin leather strip
as the hinge.It was all trial and error
from that point, so I made a prototype out of 2x6 pine.I know nothing about leather, so I made a
trip to my local Tandy Leather store, which proved to be very helpful.I picked out about $2 worth of leather from
the scrap bin, which will probably be enough for my next 20 projects ;-).The clerk/leather expert also recommended a
small bottle of neatsfoot oil, which is used to make leather very soft and
flexible.I was not aware of this magic
oil, but apparently any serious baseball player with a mitt is very familiar
with it.I used epoxy to adhere the
leather hinge strip to the wood.After a
few adjustments, I got the hinge to work just fine.Here are some photos showing steps in the
process.If anyone else out there has
had any experiences with leather box hinges, I would love to hear about them.
﻿﻿﻿﻿

A router was used to cut out the groove for the leather
hinge strip, before the box was sawn into two halves.
The leather was 0.07 " thick.

The leather hinge strips were glued on using a strong epoxy.
The photo shows the leather strip being clamped during glueing.
A scrap of wood was used to provide even pressure.

A prototype was made out of a common 2x6 to test glueing
method and clearances. I found that a thin strip of masking
tape down the middle of the hinge kept it free from epoxy
so it remained more flexible..

Neatsfoot oil was liberally placed on the leather hinge strip
using a cotton swab. This provided even more flexibility.

This photo shows the leather hinge flexing

The finished products. I made one from walnut
and the other from spalted silver maple.

Friday, November 1, 2013

My son-in-law Rick brought me a beautiful steel
knife blade with tang, and a piece of buckeye burl wood, and he asked me
if I would make him a knife handle.I couldn’t
say “no”. He must have thought that just
because I make things out of wood, I would automatically know how to make a
knife handle.Wrong.I’ve never done this before.If he had asked me to whittle a stick in the
shape of a knife, I would have used trial and error until I got it right, but with
one expensive blade and one fancy piece of wood, I knew I would only get one
single shot at doing it right.Thanks
Rick.I really needed the stress.

Well the bottom line is that, like so many things in
life, I created stress where there was no reason for stress.The task was actually not as difficult as I
had first imagined.As a first step, I
searched the internet (and more specifically YouTube), for information on how
to attach pieces of wood to the knife tang and make a handle out of it.As you might imagine, it’s all there.Also, as you might imagine, there are a
number of different approaches or techniques.Most of the techniques use epoxy to hold the wood handle parts to the metal
tang, and that’s the direction I took.Of course, you have to use metal pins to hold the whole thing together,
but with the use of the epoxy, there is no need to peen the pins to secure the
wooden halves as you might expect. I used some common sense and left some
exposed wood in all directions for sanding.Even though I normally hate sanding most wooden objects I make, I have
to admit that sanding and shaping the knife handle was actually fun.My stationary belt sander was quite useful in
the shaping.
﻿

I wrapped the blade and the exposed metal in duct tape
to protect the finish, and my hands.

During the shaping on the belt sander,
I scraped the metal on the handle.
This came out with steel wool and buffing.

I used tung oil for the
finish, and fine sanded
between each coat to get a
very smooth result.

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Of course I couldn’t just hand him the knife, so I
fixed up one of my flat cigar boxes as sort of a “presentation box”.I must admit, I was pretty proud of the final
result.Now that I am an “expert” at
making knife handles, I’m starting to look into knife kits on the internet.Have any of you had any experiences with
making knife handles?If so, I would
love to hear about them.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

I’ve heard of writer’s block, but I wonder if there
is such at thing as carver’s block.

I had this beautiful discarded cigar box made of
thick cedar wood.It was just aching to
be carved, but the box sat for weeks because I had no inspiration what-so-ever
about what to carve on it.I could use
one of those graphic Japanese crest symbols, or Celtic designs, but this box
had a certain elegance that seemed to cry out “flowers”.I went through images of flowers on the
internet, but nothing popped out.I then
decided to go through my own file of flower photographs that I had taken
myself.Bingo!I found a nice photo of zinnias taken in my
front yard.

With some tweaking, the design seemed to fit the box
well. It had nice detail, but not too difficult
to carve. I printed the photo on plain paper and then simplified the flowers by
selected the elements of the design that I thought would make a good carving on
the lid of the box.

As I mentioned in a previous post, these empty
wooden cigar boxes are available from my local cigar store for just $1 each, so
I carve the design in the lid first, before I attempt to work on the rest of
the box.If the carving doesn’t work
out, I just discard the box without wasting time on the finish or interior of
the box.Well, this carving turned out
pretty good, so I went on and finished the box.I added the black walnut corner inserts.This was the first time I did this on any box.I used a special jig that I built based on
plans in a box making book.I cut the
thin walnut corner inserts to an 1/8 inch thickness to match the kerf slot made by my table
saw blade.

interior tray

I finished the box by using the interior cedar side
spacers that came with the box to construct an interior tray.Like anything else, the more of these
interior trays I make, the better they turn out. I’m pretty pleased with the
resulting box.

The finished keepsake box

Now, I have to get inspired for my next carved box. Any suggestions?﻿﻿

Saturday, August 10, 2013

There is something about carved wooden doors in Europe that captivates me. Many are beautifully works of art. Some are centuries old. Some are in cathedrals, but others are on ordinary city streets. You don't see many doors like this in the United States.

Here is a collection for your enjoyment.

﻿﻿

door to choir loft - St. Peter's Church - Munich

door on street in Florence, Italy

﻿

Detail on main door of Basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli near Assisi, Italy

Monday, April 29, 2013

Oberammergau is a small village in the Bavarian Alps which is known for its famous Passion Play performed every 10 years, and its woodcarving. It seems like half the shops in this tourist destination are wood carving shops. Some are small, with the local wood carver proprietor actually working on pieces in the shop. Most shops are large and overwhelming with thousands of carved figures appealing to every type of tourist. They range in size from huge carvings selling for hundreds of Euros down to tiny 5 cm animals and saints. Most of the huge carvings are hand-carved in Bavaria. Most of the smaller carvings are from China or Indonesia, although not marked as such. Some items are obviously machine-carved.

For the most part, the subjects are sacred religious carvings of saints and crucifixes mixed in with a few traditional Bavarian figures. The odd thing is that most window displays also include profane or suggestive carvings right next to a Madonna holding the Infant Jesus. One might see a nude woman right next to St. Francis. On some shop websites, anything that is not religious is actually classified as profanfiguren.

One reoccurring carving theme that certainly fits into the profane category is a carving of a chubby man in a squat position, grunting and…defecating. (See photo above) This little man appeared in several shops, right on the shelf with all the religious figures. I discussed it with a shop owner who was actually carving one of these figures at the time. He explained in broken English that it is a traditional Bavarian theme. At one time, long ago, it was actually used as a form of political protest. When Bavaria was occupied by a conquering army, the carvers gave the swatting man the face of the foreign leader. Today, it is the same traditional shape but it is done as just a humorous character.

As a contrast, take a look at the photo below of the grave marker. This is not a famous carving in a prominent place. It is just a simple grave, hidden in the church cemetery. It is not a recurring theme, but rather a unique work of art. No doubt the grave marker was done by a local carver, perhaps by a family member or friend. The symbols and saints probably had some special significance to the person buried there. It is certainly sacred. It will not be found in any shop window.

If you screen out the crass commercialism and tourist focus, without a doubt, the carvers of Oberammergau are highly skilled craftsmen and they produce beautiful work. Oberammergau is a repository of carving skills passed down from previous generations. If you are a woodcarver, you get the feeling you are in a very special place, a place sacred to woodcarvers.

﻿

Carving of a Kraxentrager.
These traveling salesmen carried wood
carvings to villages throughout Bavaria.

WELCOME

This blog is dedicated to wood, and all things crafted out of wood.

It all starts with the belief that trees are, somehow, sacred expressions of the Creator. Trees are living, organic creatures with great strength and beauty. Their wood is used by humans to create things both practical and wonderful. Ancient people in all corners of the world worshiped trees as deities. These deities did not live in some far off heaven, but were connected by deep roots to the same earth that the ancient people walked upon. The people had a close relationship to these earth-bound deities, depending on them for the wood that gave them fuel, warmth and shelter. Later, almost every aspect of their lives was dependent upon wood. Vehicles, tools, ships, bridges, weapons, bowls and spoons were all made out of wood. If the tree is indeed a deity, then it is a god that has provided graciously of herself to all humans throughout the ages.

If you are a monotheist, as I am, you probably believe that your one God created trees along with everything else. I believe that they are still sacred expressions of that Creator. I believe that beautiful objects made out of wood are a homage to the wood spirit, or, if you prefer, a prayer to God.

J.M.C.

About Me

My name is John M. Casteline. I was educated as an engineer and for most of my life I worked in the business world in industrial marketing anf product management. Now I work with my hands creating things ourt of wood.